Civic Education & Participation Group

This collection of teacher writings documents the work of programs that were funded by the MA DOE to include civic participation activities in the ESOL classroom. The group includes programs that vary in size, schedules, and approaches to incorporating civics into instruction. Some weave civics into their regular ESOL coursework; some have set aside separate class time to focus on civic participation; and others have approached the civic participation work as a program-wide effort.

This broadly diverse set of programs came together to identify the promising practices that we thought were worth sharing with the field and to write up illustrations of their application.

The Promising Practices

Note: The teacher writings link from the Promising Practices for Building Civic Participation listed at the bottom of the page. Each is a Word document.

The list of promising practices we developed reflects our collective thinking about practices we believe are important in teaching for civic engagement and participation in a democracy. They are practices that we agreed on and felt we could illustrate from our collective work. Before we identified the practices, we identified some criteria for “what counts” as a promising practice. How is it different from any good lesson that we and our students have created? What makes it worth sharing with other educators? We came up with the following list:

students are active in using their voices to express views, educate others, etc.

gets people to go outside of their usual routines

there is some evidence/indication of effectiveness

We also thought about what readers would want to know. What questions do other teachers have about how to teach civics or civic participation? What might be the factors that get in the way of teachers being able to address civic participation and are there strategies we could share or demonstrate that might help them? This is what we brainstormed:

Things the field wants to know about

civics for/with various levels of learners

student leadership

assessing civics

addressing different cultural styles/norms

projects that vary in length/size

making connection between civics learning and language learning

Finally, we generated what we believe are promising practices and identified our illustrative examples. The teacher writings are organized and linked from the promising practices below. Although most pieces address more than one practice, each has been placed with the one that it best illustrates.